Threats to Northern Irish journalists on the rise

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has informed a
Belfast-based reporter that dissident republican groups, opposed to the peace
process, have issued a death threat against her, the British National Union of
Journalists said this week. The threat came after the journalist published a
story in a local Sunday newspaper claiming an Irish republican group was
protecting two alleged pedophiles in its ranks, according to the Guardian. The National Union of Journalists
has demanded the death threat to be withdrawn.

"A free press is fundamental to a democratic society
and journalists are enduring threats from both sides of the sectarian divide.
The NUJ calls on those who have made the threat to make no such threats in
future," said Nicola Coleman, NUJ Irish representative, in a statement.
Contacted by CPJ, the Police Service of Northern Ireland declined to provide any
details. "It is standard practice when we receive information about threats
against individual journalists that we inform them accordingly," a spokeswoman for
the police force said.

The
incident is the latest in a series of episodes in which reporters in Northern
Ireland are subject to intimidation by small, outlawed groups--both Irish
republicans and loyalists to the British crown--accused of perpetuating low-intensity
violence in the region. According to local media, two other journalists
received death threats last month from loyalist paramilitaries, after members
of the vigilante group Ulster Volunteer Force issued warnings about several
reporters. Their identities were not revealed, as with the latest case, out of
security concerns. News reports said the recent death threat relates to the anti-peace
process group Óglaigh na hÉireann (ONH), a small but active armed group accused
of a number of bomb attacks in the Greater Belfast area.

"Police intelligence routinely monitors chat among paramilitary groups,
and they have a policy to warn journalists if a serious threat is identified,"
Paul Connolly, managing editor of the Belfast Telegraph Group told CPJ. In January, during loyalist protests about the
British union flag being removed from Belfast City Hall, the Northern Irish
police intercepted a letter containing a bullet addressed to a reporter who had
been covering the loyalist protests. The decision by the local council--where
nationalist, unionist, and bipartisan parties are represented--to limit the
display of the flag to official holidays triggered weeks of loyalist protests late
last year and early in 2013.

CPJ documented a number of attacks in December. In one case, a pipe
bomb was left at the door of the home of freelance press photographer Mark
Pearce. A few days earlier, Adrian Rutherford, a reporter with the leading daily Belfast Telegraph, was attacked
by a gang while covering loyalist protests in East Belfast. And earlier that
month, a Belfast-based Associated Press photographer, Peter Morrison, was injured in a violent clash between police and demonstrators, allegedly after being
hit by police batons. The case has been referred by local press groups to the
Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland.

The increasing violence has raised alarms among local journalists, some
of whom are receiving security training from the NUJ and other press groups.
The Belfast Telegraph has revised
security in its building in central Belfast and is looking at additional
security measures "after the lessons on reporters' protection we took during
the loyalist protest earlier this year," Connolly said. He sees two types of
scenarios for violence against journalists in Northern Ireland: "On the one
hand, newspapers continue to investigate the activities of paramilitary groups,
and we might get threats when a reporter gets too close to the truth or
inconvenient information; in times of civil disturbances, on the other hand, we
see other kind of threats against reporters covering events such as the flare
in protests we saw last December and January."

"There has been a growing level of threat over the last six to 12 months,"
an NUJ spokeswoman told CPJ. "The range of threats is increasing, and they are
coming from both sides, so we are calling on all sides to stop threatening
journalists and respect press freedom," she said. The role of the NUJ, a
century-old journalists union with 38,000 members, has been widely praised: "It is a tribute to the NUJ that it alone appears to be the only body
offering public support to threatened journalists while highlighting the
pressures they are facing," said Roy Greenslade, the Guardian media commentator.

In August last year, a Belfast journalist, who was named in graffiti,
sprayed on a wall, received death threats reportedly from the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). The
group, also known in the past as the Ulster Volunteer Force, is an outlawed
vigilante group reportedly formed to protect Protestant enclaves from attacks
by Irish republicans. It officially ended its armed campaign in November 2007, 10
years after the Good Friday Agreement that launched the peace process in 1997.

Before the Good Friday Agreement, during "The Troubles" in Northern
Ireland, no deaths of journalists were recorded in direct relation to the
conflict. But in 2001, prominent investigative journalist Martin O'Hagan was shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries, in front of his wife, as the
couple was leaving a pub in the town of Lurgan. Another loyalist group, the
Loyalist Volunteer Force, later admitted responsibility for the Sunday World
reporter's death, but the killing remains unsolved.

All the same, Connolly, a veteran local journalist, sees "no evidence
that investigative journalism might be deterred by violence against the press."
He declared, "We will not tolerate the threats and we will expose them every
time."

Borja Bergareche is a Spanish journalist based in London and a CPJ European correspondent.